Is Waffle House closed? Then a storm is really bad. Here’s why.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Waffle House is known for staying open when other restaurants and businesses don’t.

The 24/7 breakfast chain’s reputation is so strong that there’s an established system used to determine a storm’s severity: the Waffle House Index.

If the Waffle House is open, it’s a good sign. If not, things are pretty bad.

A similar phenomenon of using a restaurant to judge a storm’s damage to an area became popular in Texas after Hurricane Beryl earlier this year. Texans consulted the app of the popular fast-food restaurant Whataburger to see which locations were open, signaling which areas had power.

Here’s what to know about the Waffle House Index.

What is the Waffle House Index?

The Waffle House Index is a way to tell how bad a storm really is and how well an area is recovering after a storm. A blog post on the restaurant’s website explains how it works:

• If a Waffle House is open and serving a full menu, it means that the situation is not bad. Lights are on.
• If a Waffle House is serving a limited menu, that likely means the restaurant has lost electricity and is running low on food supplies.
• If a Waffle House is closed, it’s “a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.”

When restaurants lose electricity, they typically use generators to preserve refrigerated or frozen foods, Njeri Boss, the vice president of food safety and public relations for Waffle House, told the News & Observer in an email. They’re able to cook food such as meats, hashbrowns and eggs using gas grills.

After each hurricane season, Waffle House reviews what happened and updates its “playbook.”

The Georgia-based company solidified its crisis management procedures after Hurricane Katrina, according to Waffle House’s blog post. Officials created a guide for opening restaurants after a disaster, increased its supply of portable generators, purchased a mobile command center and gave employees key fobs with emergency contacts.

How did the Waffle House Index get started?

W. Craig Fugate, a former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is credited with creating the index.

He told the publication Newsweek how it all began.

Before he was the FEMA administrator, he was the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. He and his team traveled to the southwest part of the state in 2004 after Hurricane Charley to see the damage. They produced a color-coded map to let the public know which areas were hardest hit, and where aid would be directed first.

And someone from Fugate’s team “slipped in an image about the Waffle House Index,” he told Newsweek. By then, they had realized which restaurants were closed, serving limited menus or were open as usual. Red indicated a closure, yellow a limited menu and green a full menu.

“If you stopped the first time you came across a downed-tree, how do you know you’re in the most heavily-impacted area?” Fugate told Newsweek. “In many cases, the Waffle Houses were one of those indicators.”

How to know if Waffle House is open or closed

The internet is not the best way to determine the status of your local Waffle House, Boss said.

It can take up to three days to update a restaurant’s status on Google, and updating the status on Waffle House’s online store locator takes too long, too.

“We have found that most people head to the location if travel is appropriate at the time in that area,” Boss said.